


give your best without a reason why

by TolkienGirl



Series: Swan Songs - Emma Swan Character Studies [2]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Abandonment Issues, Adoption, Character Study, Episode: s01e04 The Price of Gold, Gen, parenting, title from a poem by madamescarlette on Tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-08 15:55:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16432439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: "I wasn't ready." (That's not the whole story.)





	give your best without a reason why

_I wasn’t ready._

(That’s not the whole story.)

That’s not the whole story, but Emma’s not here to tell the whole story, is she? No, she’s here to get the white-lipped teen in the passenger seat through this in one piece.

And yeah, sure. She’s just realizing that she’s _here_ at all.

This town is finding its way into her blood. Emma’s made something of a study of lying to herself, or repressing shit, or whatever, but she can’t lie about that. It’s not just her bright-eyed…kid. (He _is_ her kid. She wants him to be.) It’s these damn cobble streets, and Mary Margaret’s endless stream of cardigans, and, apparently, a pregnant nineteen-year-old.

Emma doesn’t do flashbacks. Doesn’t let herself get lost in the memory of the contractions (three minutes apart, two minutes, one), which had been bearable, and the separation moments after birth, which had not.

It doesn’t matter what she was or wasn’t.

Not now.

Not here.

 

In Storybrooke, it seems to be an open question, whether she should have more stuff. Whether she should have acquired more paperback books and silver-framed photographs, more knick-knacks and dead plants. (Can you tell from her tone? She doesn’t care.)

Not sentimental. Not sentimental.

Say it often enough, it becomes a mantra.

 

Ok, so sometimes when Mary Margaret isn’t looking Emma watches the way she folds her arms around herself when she’s thinking, the way she tucks her hair behind her ear with her second finger rather than her first. The way she dabs whipped cream and cinnamon off the tip-top of her hot chocolate.

Then she shakes it off like raindrops, because Mary Margaret is _her age_. Mary Margaret isn’t her mother. Emma doesn’t have a mother.

 _That_ is a tale as old as time.

 

She tells Ashley to breathe.

(Emma breathes too.)

 

The only good thing about being endlessly alone is that you get to decide, early on, just how scared you’re ever going to get. Emma decided at about eighteen, about the time she…gave someone who wasn’t herself a _best chance_ …that she wasn’t going to be afraid of anything.

Mr. Gold seems quite unused to _that_.

And she’ll take it. She’ll take his goddamn deal, and she’ll take the deputy job that Graham offered her, and she’ll take every punch Regina throws and throw it right back at her.

 

_See you tomorrow, kid._

The light on his face is all she needs to know:

She’s ready.


End file.
